He said two people had been arrested and taken to an undisclosed location for questioning.

“I cannot say which group the two men belong to but we had an intelligence tip-off that an explosive laden vehicle is about to be delivered in Quetta,” he said.

Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, was the scene of two of the deadliest bombings in Pakistan in recent years, in early 2013, when blasts a month apart targeting minority Shiite Muslims killed nearly 200 people.

Resource-rich Balochistan is the largest of Pakistan’s four provinces, but it in addition to sectarian violence it also struggles with Islamist militancy and a separatist insurgency. -AFP